Cobwebs from an Empty Skull eBook

Presently one of the hotel pages stepped up to Mr.
Petto, handing him a telegraphic dispatch just received.
It was dated at his home in Cowville, Illinois, and
making allowance for the difference in time, something
more than two hours previously. It read as follows:

“A pot of boiling glue has just been upset upon
Jerusalem’s hind-quarters. Shall I try
rhubarb, or let it get cold and chisel it off?

“P.S. He did it himself, wagging his tail
in the kitchen. Some Democrat has been bribing
that dog with cold victuals.—­PENELOPE PETTO.”

Then we knew what ailed “the following dorg.”

I should like to go on giving the reader a short account
of this animal’s more striking personal peculiarities,
but the subject seems to grow under my hand.
The longer I write, the longer he becomes, and the
more there is to tell; and after all, I shall not get
a copper more for pourtraying all this length of dog
than I would for depicting an orbicular pig.

SNAKING.

Very talkative people always seemed to me to be divided
into two classes—­those who lie for a purpose
and those who lie for the love of lying; and Sam Baxter
belonged, with broad impartiality, to both. With
him falsehood was not more frequently a means than
an end; for he would not only lie without a purpose
but at a sacrifice. I heard him once reading
a newspaper to a blind aunt, and deliberately falsifying
the market reports. The good old lady took it
all in with a trustful faith, until he quoted dried
apples at fifty cents a yard for unbolted sides; then
she arose and disinherited him. Sam seemed to
regard the fountain of truth as a stagnant pool, and
himself an angel whose business it was to stand by
and trouble the waters.

“You know Ben Dean,” said Sam to me one
day; “I’m down on that fellow, and I’ll
tell you why. In the winter of ’68 he and
I were snaking together in the mountains north of
the Big Sandy.”

“What do you mean by snaking, Sam?”

“Well, I like that! Why,
gathering snakes, to be sure—­rattlesnakes
for zoological gardens, museums, and side-shows to
circuses. This is how it is done: a party
of snakers go up to the mountains in the early autumn,
with provisions for all winter, and putting up a snakery
at some central point, get to work as soon as the
torpid season sets in, and before there is much snow.
I presume you know that when the nights begin to get
cold, the snakes go in under big flat stones, snuggle
together, and lie there frozen stiff until the warm
days of spring limber them up for business.

“We go about, raise up the rocks, tie the worms
into convenient bundles and carry them to the snakery,
where, during the snow season, they are assorted,
labelled according to quality, and packed away for
transportation. Sometimes a single showman will
have as many as a dozen snakers in the mountains all
winter.